Monthly Archives: November 2016

30 November China Seminar: Matt Ferchen: Political risk assessment

Political Risk Assessment with Chinese Characteristics: Venezuela and Beyond

Matt Ferchen (Tsinghua University)

Beginning around 2011, when Chinese investments and citizens were caught up in unexpected turmoil and political change in places like Libya and Myanmar, Chinese government officials, academics and business leaders began to focus on better understanding and managing “political risk”. Yet at this same time China was building up its largest overseas loan portfolio, and a close diplomatic relationship, with arguably the highest risk country in the Americas: Venezuela. This talk will discuss how the concept, and management, of political risk has evolved in China in recent years and how despite these efforts China’s relations with Venezuela highlight the difficulties and contradictions in China’s new risk management efforts. The discussion will include a focus on how the political economy of “stability”, both in China’s domestic and foreign affairs, is central to understanding how risk is conceptualized and, at least in the case of Venezuela, (mis)managed.

Matt Ferchen is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing and also a resident scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy. Professor Ferchen has lived, studied and worked in China since 2000 and his research and teaching focus on the domestic and international political economy of China’s evolving development model. He has a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and a Master’s in international affairs from Johns Hopkins SAIS.

 

When & where: Wednesday 30 November 15:15-17:00 p.m. De Vrieshof 4/006 Leiden University, Leiden

23 November China Seminar: Michael Keevak: How did East Asians become yellow?

Wednesday 23 November; 15:15-17:00 p.m. Location: De Vrieshof 3/ 104 (Verbarium), Leiden University

How Did East Asians Become Yellow?

Michael Keevak

In their earliest encounters with East Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white, yet by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, this talk will explore the notion of yellowness and show that the label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. The conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped together as members of the “Mongolian race” they began to be considered yellow.

Michael Keevak is a professor of foreign languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, 2011); The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and its Reception in the West, 1625-1916 (Hong Kong, 2008); and The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, 2004). A new book, Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars, is forthcoming next year from Palgrave Macmillan.